Wordshadows

Sometimes, one entry alone will put you on a link list. Tonight I discover 2Second(fuse)

Personal Identity

What makes you who you are? What defines a human being? Thought experiments are big in philosophy, so try this one on:

It’s mid-afternoon, and Ania is plotting to have Vlad assassinated. She’s heard quite enough talk of fractal sound, science fiction, the coming Singularity and robotic overlords, so she’s secretly hired a hit-woman to shoot Vlad tonight at the café. “Ah, peace and quiet at last!”

All the excitement of his impending demise has made her a bit tired and being tired makes her cranky, so she lays down to take a little nap.

Shortly after Ania falls asleep, Vlad brings in his newly perfected duplicator machine, a device which will copy the exact configuration of a person and create another, atom for atom. It looks much like a cardboard box with controls pencilled on the side.

“This will show her,” he thinks. “She’ll see the usefulness of my crazy ideas after this.” He presses the big red button and Presto-Change-O! There are now two Anias sleeping soundly, just a few inches between them in the bed, where before was only one. He wakes the new Ania 2. Grumpy at being awakened and still groggy from sleep, she doesn’t notice the original Ania 1 lying in bed next to her. Vlad and Ania 2 proceed to the café.

At Café La Scala in Walnut Creek, Ania 2 orders her au lait and leans way back, savoring the sips as she waits for the hit-woman. She doesn’t know she’s only recently entered this world. Her memories tell her she’s lived a life of world traveling, college education and club-hopping leading up to this moment. She knows who her parents are and she knows she paid the hit-woman twenty dollars to shut Vlad up for good. She remembers doing it, but, unbeknownst to her, those memories come from Ania 1 doing the original legwork and passing the twenty to the assassin in a pack of gum.

Meanwhile, back at the house, Ania 1 has woken from her nap. She’s refreshed and feeling nice, all her previous unhappiness evaporated. She just needed to catch up on her sleep! She realizes she loves Vlad, even if his incessant rambling about things which make no sense drives her out of her mind occasionally. She’s had a change of heart about offing him. “Oh no! Look at the time! He must have let me sleep, like the sweetheart he his, and gone to the café alone! I must make haste and stop the hit-woman from shooting him!” She scrams out the door with a quickness.

At the café Vlad is working on his laptop, head bobbing to the beat in his headphones, lost in focus on his work. As Ania 1 enters the café, so does the hit-woman. The assassin sees Ania 1 and then, a heartbeat later, sees Ania 2. Both are looking at her expectantly and pointing to the guy she’s supposed to shoot. One is saying “Don’t shoot him, I’ve changed my mind!” while the other is saying “Shoot him, he’s driving me crazy!”

The hit-woman is very glad she brought two sets of handcuffs tonight, because her evening has just gone weird. She doesn’t like it when perps get jiggy and start appearing in two places at once. Yes, she’s an undercover agent in homicide and she likes to send people to the slammer.

As she slaps the cuffs on them both, Ania 1 says “I thought I wanted to kill him, but I realized I didn’t!” Ania 2, pissed off, says “I wanted to kill him, that’s why I made arrangements to do so. Who is this bimbo dressed up like me?”

Vlad looks up, finally. Seeing all the commotion, he assumes it’s excitement over his duplicator machine and begins explaining the situation to the cop.

Some questions:

Which Ania is responsible for the crime?

Ania 1 physically initiated the entire situation by doing the hiring of the assassin, but changed her mind about murdering Vlad in the end and told the hit-woman not to shoot. Should she be charged with attempted murder? Remember, she tried to stop the hit-woman at the end.

Ania 2 didn’t physically do the hiring, but thinks she did and remembers doing it, and was ready to conclude the deal and see Vlad capped. Should Ania 2 be charged with attempted murder, accessory to attempted murder or nothing at all because she wasn’t “the one” who did the hiring? She didn’t even physically exist when arrangements were made to off Vlad, but she was pointing the finger and telling the hit-woman to shoot. You could attempt to define her state as something akin to brainwashing, but if you remove the memories and motivations arising from them, what are we left with for Ania 2? She was an atom for atom duplicate of Ania 1, so there is nothing else.

What makes a person? Is it the configuration of their atoms? Is it their actions? Is it something outside of their material construction?

We know if a person’s brain is damaged, their personality and memories are damaged. They seem to change from the person they were before the injury. What is a memory? If I remember doing something, is this the same as having done it? Can I be held accountable for my memories? What if they are just duplicated brain configurations which make me think I performed the remembered act, as in the case of Ania 2 above?

If you have two people configured exactly alike down to the atom and the instant, are they the same person? Are Ania 1 and Ania 2 simply two instantiations of Ania? At this moment, if you let them jointly out of your sight you won’t know which is the original and which is the duplicate upon their return. Sharing a common memory of life up to the moment Ania 2 was awakened and went to the café with Vlad while Ania 1 stayed home asleep, how far will their paths have to diverge before they can be seen as obviously different people?

The above thought experiment, while sounding far-fetched, has implications for a wide range of issues we currently face as a world society:

cloning
gene-splicing
abortion
privacy rights
intellectual property
nationalism
religious beliefs and other superstitions on identity

What makes a person? The sooner we answer this question, the sooner I’ll make the schematic for my fabulous duplicator machine publicly available.

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