Poll: Where would you go?
I’m curious what your intuitions are about the following scenarios. Where would you be, if these stories happened? (And by “you”, I mean whatever you tend to mean when you say “I”–nothing more or less).
1. Suppose we were able to split your brain into two fully functional hemispheres (I know that this is out of the realm of scientific reality, but go with me for a moment). We transplant these two brains into two bodies–maybe you are dying of some inoperable cancer caused by too many thought experiments. Where are you?
2. Imagine that we have a transporter like on Star Trek, that can take you apart, atom by atom, and recreate those atoms somewhere else. Now consider that transporter constituting those a atoms onto Mars while also keeping them intact on Earth. This results in two identical “yous.” Is one of them you, or are they both you, or neither? (You can further suppose that the you on Earth has a terminal disease, but the Mars you promises to take care of your family. Does this give you any satisfaction that you will continue to exist and be part of your family?)
3. Consider another brain operation, this time your entire brain is excised from your body and put into a cyborg of sorts, not another human body. Doctors are able to keep your body alive, separately from your brain. Your brain remains alive and functioning in the cyborg. Where are you?
4. Finally, consider the transporter again. You and a friend are going to use it to travel to Mars. You both step into the transport room, but something goes awry in the process. On Mars, the result is not two separate beings, but a fusion: both sets of memories have been brought over, intact. Is the resulting being you?
I am posting these just to see what your knee-jerk intuitions are. If you want to discuss the reasons for them, feel free.
October 19th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
It may not be fair for me to answer these, since my Buddhist presuppositions do an end-run around the logic of the scenarios. After all, I wouldn’t blithely assume I was me in the first place, even before I went through one of these four incidents. To me, these mostly look like situations where some of my temporarily manifesting constituent parts end up displaced in various configurations. No big deal. Less dramatic but fundamentally similar displacements are constantly happening throughout our lives, and when we die the various components end up all over the place.
October 19th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Yeah, Jeff, your intuitions are probably a bit more philosophically-worked-over than the average person! Most people would think there is some “thing” that they are.
I wonder, though, even if you wouldn’t say that there is something more fundamental than those temporarily manifesting parts, what you do with the non-reflective sense that you are a mentally unified subject. Your response does state that “to me, these look like” and even if you plead “conventional truth”, there is some way in which you have to adopt the stance to even destructively analyze the stance…right?
October 19th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Really, we’re dealing with limits to language here, ones that won’t be news to you. If I wanted to be precise I’d use a Prajnaparamita Diamond Sutra rhetoric all the time: knowing that there is no actual me, we can conventionally speak of me to say that from my perspective these questions partially result from false presuppositions, etc. But that kind of talk gets pretty tedious pretty fast, doesn’t it?
It isn’t that we have to adopt a stance to _analyze_ the stance, it is merely that we have to adopt a stance to _communicate_ about stances, since language does not allow for non-referential debate on a sophisticated enough level to reflect Buddhist thinking around these issues. Or to truly represent reality, we might say. One reason why there are all the techniques intended to nonverbally convey insight in Buddhism.
Anyway, there is definitely nothing more fundamental than those temporarily manifesting parts, and that the brain creates the illusion of a non-reflective sense of a mentally unified subject is merely part of its functioning, it has nothing to do with actual representations of the real situation. There is no real me that exists apart from being a shifting bundle of mental and physical bits, so if some of those bits get shifted elsewhere we’ve only damaged a conventional notion of identity that was not accurate to begin with. This is fundamentally not a freaky exercise from the Buddhist standpoint.
Like I said, it may not be fair for me to speak to this post. The approach of the world’s Buddhists renders these questions a bit too unproblematic, whereas other folks may give you the kind of juicy debate you’d like to see.
By the way, it was groovy that you linked that last question to the Tuvix episode. Don’t you love it when sci-fi tries to deal with these brainbusters?
October 19th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Sometimes I wonder where I would be if I hadn’t spent so much of my formative years watching Star Trek!
I am still thinking about your distinction between whether this is a linguistic problem or something else. Recently I’ve been reading Siderits on the self, trying to look at Nagarjuna in translation, but also trying to come to terms with the intuitions we have & these thought experiments. I want to a) have a working model of self/mind that fits with typical human experience and intuitions but also b) comes to terms with what it means for something to “exist.” Bascially, I’m torn in different directions.
However–I was primarily curious about what people’s intuitions were, in a sort of survey. Whether that’s a legitimate question is a further question, of course! (Just downloaded an article, “Te Epistemology of Thought Experiements” which speaks to that..)
Anyway, I’m writing a paper that defends the “self” as we typically mean it to be something phenomenal, indexical, bodily, etc.–but I am carefully trying to demarcate that from what might *exist* as the self. And trying simultaneously to keep from being trivial or tackle too much.
(Final note–I really need to look into Meinong, because it is a mantra in analytic philosophy that we should avoid having our language/ontologies refer to Meinongian objects…and I wonder whether my thesis would fall into that purported fallacy…)
October 21st, 2007 at 3:16 am
1. I get tangled up with this one - I cant differentiate between the concept of two fully functioning hemispheres and the cloning scenario.
2. The star trek duplication - I’d say they’re both me. But if you were to ask the me on Earth, I would say “I am I, but the one on Mars is not I”.. and vice versa to the me on Mars.
3. I’d say I’m in the robot
4. I find this one hard to answer.