Who Will Rise Instead of Me?

Prologue

A human being changes throughout life.

This is so familiar that we hardly notice the philosophical strangeness hidden in the phrase. The body changes. The face changes. Habits, convictions, desires, and fears change. A person may forget what they once knew, abandon what they once believed, regret their own actions, and decades later scarcely recognize their former self.

And yet we say: the person has changed. No other person has appeared.

The child in an old photograph and the adult holding that photograph may differ in almost everything visible from the outside. But the adult does not say, “That was someone very much like me.” They say, “That was me.”

If a person loses an arm, we do not say that a part of the person disappeared with it. If someone receives a transplanted organ, the donor does not become a second participant in their biography. If a person forgets several years of their own life, those years do not become the life of someone else. If they fall asleep in the evening and wake in the morning, we do not think that one person ceased to exist and another appeared in their place.

In all these cases, what changes is something through which a person lives, experiences the world, and expresses themselves. But the person remains—the same personal subject to whom this continuing life belongs.

In the essay “When Life Becomes Mine,” the question was framed in terms of belonging: how what has been lived becomes my biography, an action becomes my deed, and another person becomes the one before whom I myself must answer. Here the question will be different.

What makes me the same person when almost everything changes
through which I am able to remember
and express myself?

And where is the limit of this continuity?

The most difficult boundary here is death.

The Same Body?

At first glance, the most obvious bearer of human identity is the body. I remain myself because this is still my body.

In one sense, this is unquestionably true. In earthly life, a human being exists in embodied form. We know the world through our senses, think and remember with a human brain, speak by means of the body, act with our hands, and live within a single bodily history. The body is not a shell that can simply be bracketed out while leaving the “real person” untouched.

But the phrase “the same body” turns out to be less simple than it seems.

The human organism changes continuously. Different kinds of cells renew themselves at very different rates. Many blood and epithelial cells live for relatively short periods and are constantly replaced; a substantial portion of cortical neurons, by contrast, may persist for decades. The popular claim that literally every cell in a human being is replaced every seven or ten years is therefore false. But our question does not require it. The material composition of the organism is changing anyway: connections are reorganized, tissues are renewed, the body grows, ages, heals, and sometimes irreversibly loses parts of itself.

The question can be put more simply.

A person has lost a leg. How much of the person was lost with it?

The question sounds almost absurd. The loss of a limb can radically change the life that follows: it can bring pain, alter work, gait, and a person’s relation to their own body, and sometimes alter character and the range of what is possible. It will remain part of that person’s history forever.

But no corresponding part of the person disappears with the leg. A new person does not arise to continue the biography of the former one. The same person continues—now as someone who has lived through this loss.

The same is visible in less dramatic changes. The organism of a child, an adult, and an old person is not one and the same unchanging material object. And yet a human life does not break apart into a succession of new owners of the body.

It does not follow that the body is secondary. Only a narrower claim follows: a person’s identity does not require the material composition of the body to remain unchanged.

The Interruption

Another possibility suggests itself: perhaps what preserves me is continuity of consciousness. As long as the inner stream of experience continues, I continue.

But here too, everyday experience introduces an important distinction.

Every evening a person falls asleep. Sometimes they dream and remember the dreams; sometimes they remember nothing; sometimes, between the last experience of the evening and the first of the morning, an entire interval seems simply absent for them. General anesthesia presents an even sharper case: after surgery, a person may have no accessible memory at all of the hours between administration of the anesthetic and awakening.

Of course, anesthesia is not a simple “consciousness off” switch. Rare cases of accidental awareness during general anesthesia are known, in which a patient later recalls sounds, touch, and sometimes more severe experiences. The philosophical argument should therefore not depend on the claim that subjective experience necessarily disappears completely in every case of general anesthesia.

What matters for us is something else. A person need not continuously experience and register their own “I am” for us to continue regarding them as the same person.

After surgery, no one assumes that the previous patient disappeared and a new subject opened their eyes in the patient’s place with a successfully restored biography. Nor does the person themselves, on regaining consciousness, usually begin by checking: “Am I the one who was put under a few hours ago?”

Sleep and anesthesia, however, are not models of death. In both cases, the living organism and the brain persist, and a single causal history of the body continues. That continuity is precisely what limits the analogy.

But the analogy still permits one conclusion: continuously accessible conscious experience is not, by itself, a necessary condition for a person to remain the same person.

What I Do Not Remember

It is natural, then, to turn to memory. Perhaps memory is what binds one person across time: I remain myself today because I remember the person I was yesterday.

But memory can disappear for reasons other than illness.

Sometimes a person says something in passing and almost immediately forgets it. For them it was a casual remark, not worth a place in their biography. For someone else it may become an event that lasts for years: it may wound them, sustain them, change a decision, or remain the last words spoken before a separation.

Twenty years later, that other person may say, “You said to me then…” and hear in reply, “I don’t remember that at all.”

The absence of a memory does not create a new author of the words. If the testimony is accurate, what was said remains something I said, even if my memory did not consider the event worth preserving. An episode’s significance for memory and its status as my own deed are not the same thing.

Much more can be forgotten as well: a particular deed, a period of life, people’s faces, one’s own former convictions. In dementia, access to one’s biography can sometimes deteriorate especially severely. A person may stop recognizing those close to them, lose coherent speech, and be unable to reconstruct years of their own life.

But we do not conclude that, with the destruction of autobiographical memory, the former person ceased to exist and another arose in the same body. In the human case, memory remains one of the most important ways of accessing one’s own history, but it neither grants nor revokes the right to be the same person.

Against this background, reports in contemporary scientific literature of paradoxical and terminal lucidity in severe dementia are of interest—brief returns of coherent speech, recognition, memory, or meaningful communication after prolonged cognitive decline. Their mechanism remains an open question; possible explanations discussed include a temporary restoration of network function in the brain. In 2026, neuroscientist Christof Koch included terminal lucidity among the phenomena deserving attention in the study of consciousness. For our question, one point matters here: a prolonged loss of the ability to manifest memory and coherent presence does not mean that the loss has been empirically shown to be irreversible.

And yet the central point depends neither on dementia nor on rare clinical cases.

I am myself not because I remember
my whole life.
Memory gives me access to a life history that is already mine.

Before Memory

There is an even simpler case that memory cannot turn into ordinary autobiography at all: the beginning of one’s own life.

Most people do not remember the first months and years after birth. Even where isolated early images remain, there is an enormous gap between infancy as it was lived and the later account of it. A person often knows about their first steps, illnesses, fears, embraces, their parents’ voices, and many other events only from what others have told them.

But the absence of later memory does not make these events someone else’s. It was not someone else who was that infant. It was not another person who cried, was soothed, felt pain, heard their mother’s voice, or fell asleep in someone’s arms. All of this happened to the same person, even though later they cannot recover it from their own autobiographical memory.

This distinction becomes especially acute when a child’s life ends almost at its very beginning.

When an infant dies, the parents do not lose a “short biography” or a set of capacities that had not yet developed. They lose their child—the one who had already been with them and whose own life had already begun.

The child may not have lived long enough to speak a first word, retain a single memory that would later be accessible, make a mature choice, or recognize the people who loved them. But the pain was that child’s pain, the warmth was that child’s warmth, the mother’s voice was heard by that child, the touch was experienced by that child. What was short was the child’s earthly life; it does not follow that the person was incomplete.

Biography, then, cannot mean here only the account a person is able to give of themselves. A lived history is wider than memory. It includes what actually happened to the person and was experienced by them, even if later earthly memory was never able to turn it into a recollection.

Seal and Imprint

At this point it is necessary to introduce the language of the author’s philosophical-theological hypothesis within which this question is being asked.

Evolutionary-Phase Theism (EPT) begins from the premise that the human body, brain, psyche, subjective experience, memory, language, learning, and sociality belong to the real natural history of living things. In this model, the soul is not introduced to fill a gap that neuroscience has not yet managed to explain. If future science reconstructs many more of the mechanisms of memory, self-report, decision-making, or the experience of one’s own “I,” that in itself will not compete with the hypothesis concerning the person.

EPT distinguishes a subject of experience from a personal subject. A subject of experience is one for whom something is experienced at all; this inner perspective has a natural history and, in the model, does not begin with the human being. The personal question arises at another level: to whom does a lived life belong as one’s own history, who remains the author of a deed, the bearer of an obligation, and the same subject across time?

EPT uses the Russian term Dusha-Pechat’—literally “Soul-Seal”—to designate a proposed created personal ground for the human personal lineage. This ground is not part of the brain, a physical field, or a hidden repository of psychic functions. It does not take over from the brain the work of memory, consciousness, language, or character.

In each concrete human being, the model speaks of a complete personal imprint of this personal ground. In more familiar Christian language, this complete imprint corresponds to the individual human soul. Yet the person is not reducible to the imprint: a concrete person arises and lives as an independent embodied subject with their own bodily history, their own first-person perspective, freedom, and responsibility. In the human case, this status as a person does not depend on the current level of memory, language, intelligence, capacity for self-report, or other observable functions.

This distinction matters. If the imprint were simply a little incorporeal human being temporarily placed inside an organism, then the earthly body really would be a container and the entire natural history of the psyche a secondary shell. EPT claims the opposite: earthly human life is genuinely realized in and through the body.

The complete personal imprint is not another organ or a hidden psychic mechanism. In the language of EPT, it designates the metaphysical ground of the personal continuity of a concrete human being—a continuity not reducible to the current set of functions.

What Has Been Lived

The personal ground is not a book of human destinies written in advance. Before a person is born, it does not contain that person’s future words, decisions, relationships, fears, mistakes, or deeds. Otherwise, human history would be only the replay of ready-made content.

But possibility and a life that has actually been lived have different statuses.

Before a choice, different paths exist. After a choice, there is already the deed actually performed by a concrete person. Before a word is spoken, it can still be left unsaid; once spoken, it becomes part of the relationship between two people. Before a meeting, there is not yet this particular love, this particular betrayal, this particular forgiveness. They arise within a history that is actually lived.

The same applies to inner life. Not every thought becomes a word. Not every desire becomes a deed. A person may feel rage and refrain from revenge; want to cause pain and refuse to do so; be frightened by their own intention; forgive without telling anyone what the decision cost them. A thought, a motive, a desire, a fear, an inner struggle, and a decision may all remain unknown to the rest of the world. But if they were genuinely part of this person’s lived experience, they belong to that person’s inner history.

Within the proposed hypothesis, this belonging does not disappear with the loss of earthly memory. While a person is alive, the possibility of recalling a particular episode again genuinely depends on the brain. Brain damage can close off access to the past. But loss of access does not turn what happened into an event in someone else’s life.

According to this hypothesis, death likewise does not destroy what has already been lived. The same person retains their own history as it was actually lived—not only what they remembered at the final moment of earthly life, but also what was forgotten, what illness prevented them from retaining, what never became a stable autobiographical memory, and the inner life they genuinely lived but never expressed to others.

The model does not explain how this fullness of one’s own history becomes accessible to the person beyond the earthly mode of memory. Only the distinction itself is asserted here: life is not stored in advance as a finished script, but what has truly become the life of a concrete person is not erased when that person’s earthly access to it ends.

The Boundary

Up to this point, all changes took place within a continuing earthly life. The body changed, access to memories disappeared, accessible consciousness was interrupted—but a living person remained, and that person’s psychophysical history continued.

Death breaks precisely this continuity.

It is not another form of amnesia. It is not a very long sleep. It is not the loss of one final part of the body. The present psychophysical mode of human life comes to an end: the brain ceases to function, the organism breaks down, and the mechanisms through which perception, memory, action, and the expression of the person were realized in earthly life disappear.

If a human being is wholly exhausted by this continuity, then there really is no further personal question. After death, the consequences of a person’s deeds, the memories of those close to them, records, descendants, and things they created may remain—but not the person themselves.

Christian hope does not accept death as the last word about the human being. It speaks of resurrection.

Within the proposed extension of EPT, death ends the earthly mode of embodied life, but it does not destroy the personal line or erase the history that has actually been lived. The same personal identity is preserved; in the model, the metaphysical ground of this continuity remains the complete personal imprint.

We do not know what the preservation of the person between death and resurrection consists in. We do not know whether our familiar temporal sequence applies to this state, how a first-person perspective exists without the present brain, or in what way the person has access to their lived history.

These questions remain open. For what follows, only one distinction matters: in the proposed hypothesis, the end of the present psychophysical mode of life and the end of personal identity are not the same thing.

A Spiritual Body

But if personal identity is preserved through death, why speak of resurrection at all? Why not stop at the immortality of the soul?

This is precisely where it matters that, in this model, a human being was never a soul temporarily using a biological apparatus. Their earthly history was embodied from beginning to end.

Pain was bodily. An embrace was bodily. A voice was bodily. Fatigue, illness, food, journeys, touch, labor, the birth of a child, aging—none of these is stage scenery against which the “real” spiritual biography took place. They are human life itself in its earthly mode.

The continuation of the personal line after death therefore does not yet exhaust the Christian claim about the resurrection of the human being.

In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul speaks of resurrection by drawing a sharp contrast between the present and future states:

“It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” (1 Corinthians 15:44)

He speaks of corruption and incorruption, weakness and power, the transformation of the living, and the resurrection of the dead. This language does not sound like a description of a simple repair of present biology.

But the expression “spiritual body” does not, conversely, give us warrant to declare resurrected embodiment immaterial in some precise sense already known to us. Paul affirms both embodiment and transformation, but he does not offer a physical specification of the future state.

No physical model of resurrected embodiment can be derived from this contrast. We do not know what it is “made of,” how it relates to the present laws of physics, or whether our familiar categories of matter, space, and time can properly be applied to it at all.

The apostle Paul’s words hold embodiment and transformation together: Christian hope concerns not merely the continuation of a disembodied soul’s existence, but the resurrection of the same person in a mode of embodied being that is unknown to us.

The Same Person

But if personal identity does not require preserving the same material constituents, another possible answer arises: perhaps it is enough to preserve all of a person’s content—their memory, character, habits, and history?

Modern technology offers a simple analogy.

A modern phone is connected to a cloud account. Contacts, photographs, messages, apps, and settings can be stored outside the device itself. If the old phone breaks, a person buys a new one, signs in to the account, and after a while has a device whose content is very much like that of the old one.

In everyday speech, the person may say, “I restored my phone.” But if the old device has not been destroyed, the same cloud backup can be deployed on two devices. Preserving the content by itself does not make two devices one and the same object.

For a human being, the analogy is useful only up to a point. It shows why resurrection cannot be reduced to a backup copy of memory, character, and habits. Even a perfect archive of a human life is not, by itself, the one who lived. An archive does not love, answer, suffer, or recognize its past as its own.

But it does not follow that lived history is unimportant. Without it, the continuation of this particular biography would disappear. Yet preserving content still does not answer the central question: does the person whose life it was remain?

This is precisely where the proposed model differs from the scheme “the person disappears completely—the data remain—a new carrier is then created and the data are loaded into it.” EPT does not propose the complete disappearance of the personal subject followed by the production of a likeness. It proposes the preservation of the same personal line through death.

Therefore resurrection, if Christian hope is true, cannot mean the appearance of a new subject who is given the dead person’s history. What is at issue is the same person in a new mode of embodied being.

This does not answer the question of the mechanism of resurrection. We do not know how the Creator brings about resurrection, how resurrected embodiment relates to the former body, or which categories are applicable to this transition at all.

But for the question of identity, mechanism is not the first issue. Even perfect similarity, completeness of memory, and preservation of the entire lived history do not by themselves answer the central question: will the one who finds themselves on the other side of death be me—or merely someone indistinguishable from me?

Instead of a Conclusion

Over the course of one human life, the body can change beyond recognition. Part of what has been lived is forgotten. The earliest years may never become accessible as autobiographical memories at all. Conscious experience is not always continuously accessible—for example, in sleep or under anesthesia. Illness can take away even a person’s ability to name their own past.

But none of these changes by itself makes someone else the owner of that life. A forgotten word remains my word. A childhood I do not remember remains my childhood. Pain to which I no longer have access was my pain.

The proposed hypothesis carries this distinction across the most difficult boundary—death. The earthly psychophysical mode of life ends, but the person who lived that life does not disappear. Their lived history—what memory preserved and what was forgotten, what was expressed outwardly and what remained within their inner life—remains the history of the same person.

We do not know what that person’s existence after death consists in or what resurrected embodiment is like. The apostle Paul’s words about a “spiritual body” do not provide a physical scheme of the future state. But for the question posed here, something else is enough: neither preserving information about a person, nor restoring their memory, nor perfect similarity to them is by itself sufficient to establish personal identity.

The question in the title therefore receives a simple answer within this hypothesis.

Who Will Rise Instead of Me?
No one.

If resurrection is true, the Creator does not create someone else after my death who receives my memories and my biography. Resurrection is not the transfer of my life to a successor, nor the awakening of a being that merely remembers itself as me. The one who rises is the one who lived this life—with its forgotten childhood, spoken words and silences, love and fear, mistakes and decisions, pain and inner struggle. Death does not turn that person’s life into the biography of someone else.

My life will not be given to another.
No copy will awaken with my memories.
No successor will continue my history.

I will rise.