The Metaphysics of Personal Identity
I have recently read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Altered Carbon. Both books had enormously entertaining stories. But they both relied on a metaphysics of personal identity that I found dubious to say the least.
Both books employ the idea that it will eventually be possible to digitize human consciousness. When this occurs, we can keep a full backup of ourselves on a device like a computer chip. That way, whenever our physical body dies, our consciousness will still be preserved on the chip. From there, it can be downloaded into a fresh body. Altered Carbon is named after the medium in which human consciousness is digitized. The process by which this consciousness gets downloaded into a fresh body is known as "re-sleeving". Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom preserves human lives by a similar method. People can make backups of their consciousness onto a computer as often as they like. That way, if they ever die, a clone of them can be made immediately and given the memories from their backup, so that they can "live" again.
I find this notion of "immortality" to be extremely implausible. The main difficulty seems to be the very notion that my consciousness could ever be downloaded onto a chip. I might be persuaded that my consciousness could be copied in such a manner. But I could never be persuaded that my consciousness was actually being transferred by this process. And if it is not being transferred, then the restored human at the end of the process is not really me at all. It is simply a copy of me, with its own life to live and problems to solve. I, on the other hand, continue to be just as mortal after the copying process as I ever was before it began.
Of course, this issue concerns the metaphysics of personal identity. What makes a person the same person over time? According to at least one theory of personal identity, the resulting person from the above process is not just a copy of you; it is really you. This is the theory that states that memory continuity makes for personal identity. Under this theory, you are nothing more than what you remember. Therefore, if someone else remembers all of the things that you remember, then they must be you. The re-sleeved humans from Altered Carbon contain all of your memories, therefore they must be you. Therefore, you have indeed survived your own physical death, and this process must indeed be a means to true immortality.
However, I think that the memory continuity view has serious problems. The problems to which I wish to call attention will also hold for any other view based solely on continuity. In order for a person to be the same person over time, any form of continuity will never be enough. To see this more clearly, we might perhaps think of the example of a chair. It may well be possible to specify a chair completely from top to bottom, down to the last atom. That way, when an old chair falls apart, we can replace it with a new chair. We might be able to build it atom-by-atom from the ground up using nanotechnology based on our information about the chair. The resulting chair will be qualitatively identical to the original chair in every respect. Yet to call it the same chair would be missing one important point.
With the examples of both chairs and people, there is an important source of confusion. It is type/token ambiguity in the word "same". For example, one thing that you can definitely say about both chairs is that they are the same type of chair. But they are two different tokens of the same type. Exactly the same claim can be made about the person who dies a physical death and the person who is created from a backup of the former person's consciousness. You can definitely say that they are the same type of person. But they are two different tokens of the same type.
The question therefore becomes, which are you, your token or your type? Notice that this question may have a very different answer for a person than it does for a chair. Nothing really seems riding on the issue of whether a chair is its type or its token. It might be either depending on our purposes of the moment. But our overriding purpose in asking this question of a human being is self-preservation. If you decide that the restored human is not the same person as you, then there is no point in making a backup of yourself in the first place. If, on the other hand, you decide that it is the same person as you, then it is only rational to back yourself up. In fact, lots of things would become rational for you that would be irrational otherwise. I will illustrate this fact with an example from Broken Angels, the sequel to Altered Carbon. In Broken Angels, a group of mercenaries perform an operation in an area contaminated by radiation. They consequently spend a large part of the story dying of radiation poisoning. Yet this is deemed to be irrelevant, simply because they can always restore themselves in new bodies later on. But the whole exercise would be pointless if the restored humans are not the same people. They would simply be irrational to work in an irradiated area in the first place.
We have therefore concluded that we must address the issue of type/token ambiguity. We must decide, in particular, whether we are our token or our type. I will address this specific question in a later section.
Both books employ the idea that it will eventually be possible to digitize human consciousness. When this occurs, we can keep a full backup of ourselves on a device like a computer chip. That way, whenever our physical body dies, our consciousness will still be preserved on the chip. From there, it can be downloaded into a fresh body. Altered Carbon is named after the medium in which human consciousness is digitized. The process by which this consciousness gets downloaded into a fresh body is known as "re-sleeving". Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom preserves human lives by a similar method. People can make backups of their consciousness onto a computer as often as they like. That way, if they ever die, a clone of them can be made immediately and given the memories from their backup, so that they can "live" again.
I find this notion of "immortality" to be extremely implausible. The main difficulty seems to be the very notion that my consciousness could ever be downloaded onto a chip. I might be persuaded that my consciousness could be copied in such a manner. But I could never be persuaded that my consciousness was actually being transferred by this process. And if it is not being transferred, then the restored human at the end of the process is not really me at all. It is simply a copy of me, with its own life to live and problems to solve. I, on the other hand, continue to be just as mortal after the copying process as I ever was before it began.
Of course, this issue concerns the metaphysics of personal identity. What makes a person the same person over time? According to at least one theory of personal identity, the resulting person from the above process is not just a copy of you; it is really you. This is the theory that states that memory continuity makes for personal identity. Under this theory, you are nothing more than what you remember. Therefore, if someone else remembers all of the things that you remember, then they must be you. The re-sleeved humans from Altered Carbon contain all of your memories, therefore they must be you. Therefore, you have indeed survived your own physical death, and this process must indeed be a means to true immortality.
However, I think that the memory continuity view has serious problems. The problems to which I wish to call attention will also hold for any other view based solely on continuity. In order for a person to be the same person over time, any form of continuity will never be enough. To see this more clearly, we might perhaps think of the example of a chair. It may well be possible to specify a chair completely from top to bottom, down to the last atom. That way, when an old chair falls apart, we can replace it with a new chair. We might be able to build it atom-by-atom from the ground up using nanotechnology based on our information about the chair. The resulting chair will be qualitatively identical to the original chair in every respect. Yet to call it the same chair would be missing one important point.
With the examples of both chairs and people, there is an important source of confusion. It is type/token ambiguity in the word "same". For example, one thing that you can definitely say about both chairs is that they are the same type of chair. But they are two different tokens of the same type. Exactly the same claim can be made about the person who dies a physical death and the person who is created from a backup of the former person's consciousness. You can definitely say that they are the same type of person. But they are two different tokens of the same type.
The question therefore becomes, which are you, your token or your type? Notice that this question may have a very different answer for a person than it does for a chair. Nothing really seems riding on the issue of whether a chair is its type or its token. It might be either depending on our purposes of the moment. But our overriding purpose in asking this question of a human being is self-preservation. If you decide that the restored human is not the same person as you, then there is no point in making a backup of yourself in the first place. If, on the other hand, you decide that it is the same person as you, then it is only rational to back yourself up. In fact, lots of things would become rational for you that would be irrational otherwise. I will illustrate this fact with an example from Broken Angels, the sequel to Altered Carbon. In Broken Angels, a group of mercenaries perform an operation in an area contaminated by radiation. They consequently spend a large part of the story dying of radiation poisoning. Yet this is deemed to be irrelevant, simply because they can always restore themselves in new bodies later on. But the whole exercise would be pointless if the restored humans are not the same people. They would simply be irrational to work in an irradiated area in the first place.
We have therefore concluded that we must address the issue of type/token ambiguity. We must decide, in particular, whether we are our token or our type. I will address this specific question in a later section.
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