The article explores the relation between personal identity and life-changing decisions such as the decision for a certain career or the decision to become a parent. According to L.A. Paul (Paul 2014), decisions of this kind involve “transformative experiences”, to the effect that - at the time we make a choice - we simply don’t know what it is like for us to experience the future situation. Importantly, she claims that some new experiences may be “personally transformative” by which she means that one may become a “new kind of person” having a different subjective perspective and “identity”. The article discusses this understanding of a transformed future self. It will be argued that different notions of identity can be distinguished with respect to Paul’s claim: the notion of identity in the sense of a (core) personality as well as the notion of numerical identity in the sense of sameness. By distinguishing these two notions it will become more clear how a future experience may indeed qualify as “personally transformative”. Moreover, it will be shown that the notion of a self-understanding of persons helps to further clarify the kind of change at issue.

本文探讨了个人身份与改变人生的决定（例如某个职业的决定或成为父母的决定）之间的关系。根据LA Paul（Paul 2014）的说法，此类决策涉及“变革性的经验”，其结果是-在我们做出选择时-我们根本不知道我们经历未来的情况是什么样。重要的是，她声称某些新经历可能是“个人变革”，通过这种经历，她意味着一个人可能会成为一种具有不同主观视角和“身份”的“新型人”。本文讨论了对转变后的未来自我的这种理解。有人会争辩说，就保罗的主张而言，可以区分不同的身份概念：从（核心）人格意义上的身份概念以及从同一性意义上的数字身份概念。通过将这两个概念区分开，将会变得更加清楚，未来的体验如何真正符合“个人变革”的条件。此外，将表明，对人的自我理解的概念有助于进一步阐明所讨论的变化的种类。