Greetings, earthlings. Let’s talk about identity.
Introduction
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s years and decades in the future. Technology’s advanced to the point where we have honest-to-god teleporters. To the point that real people (instead of just lizardmen billionaires) can afford to jaunt around at not quite the speed of light.
You hop in your car and ride out to what — long before you were born — had been an airport. You pay for your teleportation ticket and you step into the science fiction machine of chrome and blinking lights. The automatic door whirs shut and locked behind you. You take a seat inside the teleporting, and the machine proper switches on.
A foglike cloud of nanobots decends and knows every cell in your bodies. Blistering lasers fire and bounce and turn your atoms to information. Your last thought is a growing impatience at these theatrics. Your last sight is a laser coming right for your retina. Your eyes are dazzled, and you see no more.
You — your information, I mean; put a pin in that — rides a beam up to what’s become a veritacle ring of a satelites and space stations, Saturn’s envy. From there you are a straight line of radio light angle precise to be recepted on the vast distant colonies of Pluto, where women gaze wistfully at the outer darkness and men marry Mi-go.
The machine waiting for you there undoes all the hard work that turnt you to information, recounstructing atom and cell, and your mind, neuron-by-neuron, fires to life in what looks like the same asceptic clean teleporter room, though your ass on the seat is much lighter.
You hadn’t even skipped a thought.
You step from the teleporting, smiling and thanking the miling gracious receptionists, and on your merry way you’re off to whatever business you have on Pluto.
Psyche! I’ve been lying to you for the whole denoument of my little flash fiction. You can pull out the pin now.
Where’s here to ask: is this really you who’s walking out of the teleporter on Pluto? Or is a strange fleshbag that identical, indistinguishable from you in every conceptable way? Which, y’known, well-actually isn’t you, technically?
[Contrapoints sting]
To be fair, though, it isn’t as though the peddlers of this brand of nonsense are talking completely out of their ass. They’re talking out of their ass with arguments and thought experiments!
Oh, and intuition. It wouldn’t be bad philosophy without throwing a muscle trying to shove a square intuition into a round whole until it crack and the corners shatter, leaving you with a rounded square you can shimmy on down into the hole. Afterwards they proudly declare it was a square hole all along.
But I digress. I’m not bitter.
You see, what if the machine worked just a little bit differently. Imagine on the day you take your fateful trip to Yuggoth, there’s a little bit of a software mishap. A glitch, to be vulgar. If you spent any length of time making software — or just using it — this shouldn’t be hard to imagine. It’s probably happening somewhere on that little device that’s playing this video, somewhere.
This glitch is insidious. The nanobot cloud descends and maps out every cell wall and neural connection. Your entire genome and connectome is recorded and — though you cannot see or sense this — fired off to Yuggoth, where the story proceeds much as it had before.
But not for you. You’re still sitting in that teleport room, molested by nanobots, waiting for your eyes to dazzle.
You’re waiting, waiting, waiting.
Wait – no pun intended — hold up. You are waiting. As in, you, emphasis on the you, are waiting.
You aren’t on Yuggoth. You’re on earth, in the teleporter terminal. You never left.
Clearly the ‘you’ on Yuggoth isn’t truly actually technically really you.
So why would it be any different if you had been killed? You’d be dead, and have a clone — not you — on a pluto. But you’d still be dead, and just because it’s identical doesn’t mean it’s the same thing!
This is a dumb argument, and the people who are taken in by it aren’t thinking hard enough.
Let’s do another thought experiment. Imagine a bunch of people with nothing better to do sitting on a giant sports field in nowhere important.
They move slowly about, or not at all, like the world’s most stationary game of soccer.
They move so slowly, in fact, that before they are removed from the field, they’ve scarcely gotten close to another player.
We can take too many to buy cans of paint and draw gigantic circles around every player on the field, the circles defined as the bounderies they’ll never cross during play.
No one ever moves so far to leave their paint circle. Every player get a paint circle, and every paint circle is drawn around some player.
The keen among you might see where I’m going with this. The circles are, crudely, the space of identities we’ll have before we die. Whereever the player currently is in their circle, that’s their identity at that particular moment.
We can extend this analogy to cover what happens with our teleporter goes awry, and now there’s two of you. Simply, break our rules and put two people inside a circle.
Of course breaking the rules leads to contradiction, and people shouldn’t be so absolutely surprised that weird things happen to our intuitions when you start breaking rules. What if the sky were two colors at once? Is it still blue?
In the stands, the crowds of people are shocked and outraged at this development, and promptly descend into bloody civil war over this matter.
Every contradiction serves to split a category in half, and this one is no different.
On one side of civil war, we have those who equate identity with the circles. They’re in the same circle, these folks cry, therefore they are the same player!
On the other side, we have the those who equate identity with bodies. They’re two different bodies, these folks cry, they are the same person.
They’re fighting over how to resolve the ambiguity of identity, never realizing that this isn’t an ambiguity of identity. It was not after all ambiguous when the word was coined; it crept up on them. The context changed to make this lossy abstraction, this compiler optimization, this heuristic, of thinking that that the same player equals same circle equals the same bodies always holds.
It doesn’t, and therefore the category simply isn’t well-founded.
“But which one is really you?” people are dying to know.
But it’s a misguided question, like asking a lesbian couple “But which one of you is the man?”
It’s a error. That concept doesn’t apply here. We only have the word “you” as the word you, because there is only one of “you”.
Once there is two of you, there no longer is a you, just as when you become married, you no longer are a bachelor. You don’t become a married bachelor, you stop being a bachelor.
In a world where this sort of cloning is commonplace, the idea of “you” as a singular thing, the way we concieve of it, will die out as the flawed, useless understanding it’s become (or, arguable, already is).
In this world, it will be useful to have a word for an identity-without-body, and it will be useful to have a word for identity-with-body. Perhaps even a word for identity-in-itself.
As time passes onward your past self is replaced with a present and then future selves, and this process is an operation which preserves the identity-with-body.
When you are cloned and killed in a single action, this too preserves the identity-with-body, for the same reason that the months it takes to clone and kill every cell in your body. It’s not the body which contains the identity-with-body, because myopic focus on the body erodes the very concept of a body. It’s the singularness of it. It’s the causality of it.
Make no mistake, however. There is not one “identity-with-body”. It’s a flow. Like the links of a chain, your past had a identity-with-body, and your present and future. Each one is itself, yet is defined and inseperable from those links that come before and after it.
And finally, when you are cloned outright, the identity-with-body splits in two, one chain flow following your clone, and one following you.
You cannot ask which one is “still you” as you could of the linear flow of identity. This linear concept of identity, uh, requires linearity of identity, and this is completely eroded once you introduce the non-linearity of cloning.
The identity-with-body is divided. The identity-without-body, however, remains. In the sense of you identity-with-body, the clone is not the future original. In the sene of identity-without-body, it is.
Do not ask, “which one is really me?”. Ask, “what is really me?”.