ABSTRACT
Our awareness of ourselves and others as experiencing subjects is manifest in thought and imagination concerning counterfactual situations. We understand what it is for a counterfactual situation to contain a given real conscious subject A (in other words, to contain a subject identical to A) by what we call conceiving of identity by taking perspectives. To conceive of a real subject A as identical to a counterfactual subject B is to conceive of all experiences B undergoes as being such that there is a way it is like for A to undergo them (in the relevant Nagelian sense of that locution). Conceiving of transworld identity of conscious subjects in that manner thus crucially involves what we call a for-a-subject content, that is a content concerning the way it is like for a subject to have certain properties or to be in certain situations. Yet we can also imagine a counterfactual individual as identical with a given real one by taking perspectives in an analogous sense. We explore the relations between conceiving of identity and imagining identity by taking perspectives and argue for the following results. The capacity to conceive of identity by taking perspectives presupposes the capacity to imagine identity by taking perspectives and vice versa. However, each of these capacities can be exercised without exercising the other.
