Will share with you an email conversation I had yesterday:

Initial email from COL M., actually in reference to something forwarded: "Ed, Did I send this to you? Might be useful."

My response: "Is this a trick question, sir?

"1. On the premise that the same man can never step in the same river twice, perhaps not. (a) The implicit argument behind this premise has to do with change and the passage of time. (b) If time is an illusion, then change may also be an illusion. (c) If change is an illusion, then the you who typed the question, the you who pressed send, and the who you were when I read it, and the who you are now as you read this (versus the who you are who cogitates upon the who you are brought forth by opening up the possibility of being sucked down this ontological-epistemological rat-hole) are all one and the same and then the answer would be 'Yes, you did send this to me.'

"2. Alternatively, if durability is an essential feature of identity, then perhaps so. (Durability being defined as the property of unchangingness in key features of an individual existant, presumptive of a non-illusory passage of time.) [One wonders if a key differentia of non-existants is a particularly pronounced unchangingness: does the bald present King of France differ today from what he wasn't forty years ago? Interesting proposal when one of the strongest personality traits in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Twain's Huck Finn is their ability to change.]

"3. Maybe this is a much simpler bio-psychological question, empty of existential angst, and your short-term memory is so cheesy that you forget what you are doing even as the neurons fire off signals from your neo-cortex to your phalanges. Should this be the case, I ought to suppose that your memory is so shot-through that even if I did say 'Yes, you did send this to me' as a simple affirmation of your having hit send, that you would forget that I had replied almost before you read from here to there. In that case, why bother? Perhaps out of some sentiment for the you you used to be rather than out of pity for the burnt husk to which corruption of the flesh has rendered you in only six short months at CENTCOM; something rather like patting you on the head and wiping the drool from your chin there in the regimental lodge as you stare listlessly at your Port, then quietly stepping over to the bar and entering into low-voiced conversation with the other fellows and tsk'ing 'Pity about old M.'

"All that aside, it may be useful."