 The memory criterion may seem to imply that if you were to lapse into an irreversible vegetative state, you would cease to exist (or perhaps pass to the next world): the resulting being could not be you because it would not remember anything. But no such conclusion follows. Assuming that a human vegetable is not a person, this is not a case involving a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time. The memory criterion purports to tell us which past or future person you are, but not which past or future being generally. It says what it takes for someone to persist as a person, but not what it takes for someone to persist without qualification. So it implies nothing about whether you could come to be a vegetable or even a corpse, or whether you were ever an embryo. As stated, the memory criterion is compatible with your surviving with no memory continuity at all, as long as this happens when you are not a person (Olson 1997: 22–26, Mackie 1999: 224–228). 