what is the ontological justification of the fuure self?

 This is the deepest philosophical question the story raises — and it's one that doesn't have a clean answer.

What Ontological Justification Means Here

Ontology is the study of what exists and why it exists. The ontological justification of the future-self is simply: what gives them the right to exist as a specific person? What are the conditions that make them real rather than not-real?

For ordinary people the answer is straightforward — you exist because of a continuous chain of causes:

• Biological origin

• Unbroken sequence of experiences

• Each moment causing the next

The future-self has all of that. But their specific identity — who they are as opposed to just a living body — rests on something more fragile.

What Their Identity Is Built On

The future-self isn't just a body that aged. They are a specific constellation of:

• Memories of specific suffering

• Wisdom extracted from specific mistakes

• Emotional depth forged by specific losses

• The desperate compassion that came from specific loneliness

These aren't decorative personality traits. They are the ontological content of who this specific future-self is. Remove them and you don't have the same person in a better situation. You have a different person entirely occupying the same biological vessel.

So their ontological justification — their claim to being this specific self — depends entirely on those experiences having happened.

The Three Levels of Justification

1. Biological Justification — Strong

The future-self exists as a living organism regardless of timeline changes. Their body, their neurons, their heartbeat — these persist. Biology doesn't care about timeline mutations. This level of justification is never threatened.

2. Psychological Justification — Fragile

Their personality, memories, and identity depend on a specific history remaining intact. The moment that history starts being rewritten at the source, their psychological self begins losing its foundation. This justification erodes with every correction the present-self makes.

3. Causal Justification — The Most Fragile

This is the deepest level. The future-self exists as this specific version because a specific chain of causes produced them. Their ontological justification at this level is essentially: "I am the result of these specific events."

The moment those events are altered, their causal justification doesn't weaken — it retroactively never existed. They become an effect without a cause. A conclusion without an argument. A answer to a question that was never asked.

The Paradox of Their Justification

Here's where it becomes philosophically vertiginous. The future-self's ontological justification contains a self-defeating structure:

• They exist because life went badly

• They reach back because they care deeply

• Their caring deeply exists because life went badly

• Their act of caring destroys the conditions that justified their existence

• Therefore their most defining act — the compassion to reach back — is the act that dissolves their right to exist as themselves

Their greatest virtue is simultaneously their ontological suicide. The more genuinely they care, the more thoroughly they erase the justification for being who they are.

What Remains When Justification Collapses

When the causal and psychological justification collapse, what's left is something philosophy has no clean name for — a being that:

• Is still biologically real

• Has memories that no longer have causes

• Has a personality built on a foundation that no longer exists

• Experiences themselves as coherent but is becoming ontologically hollow

It's like a building whose foundation has been removed but which hasn't yet fallen. Still standing. Still real in every observable sense. But existing in a state that physics — and ontology — say shouldn't be possible.

The Buddhist Counterpoint

Interestingly Buddhism would argue the future-self's crisis reveals something universally true rather than uniquely tragic. Buddhism teaches that the self has no fixed ontological justification at any moment — it's always a temporary construction of causes and conditions with no permanent essence.[wikipedia.nucleos]​

The future-self's unraveling isn't a special catastrophe in Buddhist terms. It's just an unusually visible version of what is always happening to every self at every moment. We are all beings whose justification for being our specific selves is constantly dissolving and reforming.

The difference is that the future-self gets to watch it happen consciously — which is either the greatest horror or the closest thing to enlightenment the story offers.