The Phantom Self – Introduction
Friday, November 25th, 2011When planning the Phantom Self project, I felt eagerness combined with apprehension – which is one way we typically feel when future events loom in our lives. I think about other’s futures with increased equanimity. I have great difficulty feeling the same way regarding your future as about my very own. It is like attempting to imagine that my left arm belongs to someone else – a bizarre, difficult feat of the imagination – yet there are cases in neurophysiology which are convinced that experience in otherwise sane individuals.
We’re attached to the saga of ourselves as ongoing subjects of expertise. We readily imagine we’ll somehow persist, to have experiences, despite the death in our biological organisms. A lot of us who do not have confidence in an afterlife nevertheless don’t have any trouble imagining one. I picture myself floating up, from my body system. I see grief-stricken friends and family around the bed. I hear their conversations – I try to participate and realize I am unable to be heard. Later, I leave the earth and discover myself in some other place – hopefully a pleasing one – where I might again meet individuals who were my buddies when I was alive.
Such ideas are impossible to disprove. But there is little if any scientific evidence on their behalf. The idea of an afterlife strikes me as wishful thinking. Let’s assume I am not something that can exist independent of a full time income body. Then what am I? To try to answer that question, I’ll introduce a thought-experiment. A thought-experiment is a method used by philosophers to clarify concepts. The experimenter describes a hypothetical situation, then asks, “What would we are saying about that, if it happened?” As thought-experiments go, this one is plain vanilla. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics; in fact, it is so consistent with current technological trends that it could become reality within a few decades. And then we’ll have to decide what to say about this.
We are getting excellent at capturing information about the planet in electronic form. Consumer-grade digital camera models acquire images in breathtaking detail – much better than my aging eyes. Digital sound and video recording are commonplace. 3D shape capture – an area I worked in for years – is constantly on the improve. Motion capture is used to great effect by the video game and animation industries. Automated chemical analysis is yet another burgeoning field. And our ability to capture more information concerning the human body is improving at warp speed. From old-fashioned Xrays and EEG’s to biometrics, PET scans and functional MRI’s, we are able to measure countless attributes of our living organisms, not only static qualities like fingerprints but dynamic information about fleeting brain-states. The BC Cancer Agency can now sequence an individual’s entire genome within fourteen days. This time is visiting a purchase of magnitude every 5 years. In the event that trend continues for thirty years, we’ll do it inside a second.
By the way, a full genome could be stored in a very manageable 1.6 Gb file.
Now guess that in, say fifty years – by 2059 – we’ll have the ability to create the same as the transporter technology of Star Trek. I visualize it as being a scanner that can capture enough details about physical objects to allow them to be rebuilt at another location. Things transported this way look and taste just like the originals. The technology works for animate in addition to inanimate objects – living creatures continue to live after digitization and reconstruction. They know their names and addresses, recognize their friends, and can recite exactly the same poetry or sports statistics.
Think about the advantages of information-based teleportation compared to airplanes.
To begin with, planes pollute – one transcontinental flight uses up a person’s carbon allowance to have an whole year. Secondly, flying is less and less pleasant. Not just shall we be bums in seats, we’re bums that are security risks, who must be put through the ritual humiliations from the Department of Homeland Security. Third, airline travel is unreliable. Although the risk to life and limb is small, the chance of missed flights and lost luggage is huge. Fourth – going back to number 1, carbon – rising fuel costs will in the end raise ticket prices to some deterrent level. Individuals will again decide to not fly because it’s too expensive.
Think about the convenience and potentially inexpensive of travelling as information. No taxis to airports fifteen miles on vacation. You don’t need to appear 2 hours ahead or take off your shoes. Just visit a transporter facility where you live, pick a cubicle, get scanned with all your stuff and – after a few minutes or maybe an hour to transmit a gargantuan slug of data on the internet – you find yourself in another cubicle in your destination city. If it’s internationally, you will still need to go through customs and immigration.
A fail-safe system with plenty of data integrity checks to ensure that big, complicated files are successfully copied without losing a single bit. Should you lived in 2050, can you use teleportation technology? If others tried on the extender, if the safety record was good, I bet you’d. The choice will be trains and ships – nice, but expensive and slow – or teleconferencing and 2nd Life – useful, although not like being there. And here comes the sharp point of the idea experiment. Individuals will just use teleportation when they be prepared to survive it. They’ll use it – therefore they’ll be prepared to survive it.
If I am teleported to Australia, the living, breathing individual who emerges in the terminal here is going to be regarded by society as the same guy who entered the terminal in North Vancouver. Testing our concept of ‘the same person’ from the thought experiment of teleportation, I, for just one, fall on the side of, “Yes, that might be me.” Being teleported is not the same as dying. Everything important about me could be preserved. This can lead to the conclusion that what’s essential in personal identity is not substance, but attributes.
The material substance of my physical organism stays in North Vancouver, where it may be decomposed into its constituent molecules. The business of my organism is transmitted to Australia, where it is reinstantiated inside a new substance.
The transfer of thinking from substance to attributes is subtle. It’s also abstract. Exactly what does it mean? Being attributes instead of substance implies that we are less like musical instruments than like tunes – less like computing devices and much more like software. Beethoven’s 5th is the same bit of music when played by different orchestras and heard in different concert halls. It is instantiated in a number of media – in sheet music, Ipods, and human memory. Firefox is a program running on millions of computers.
As attributes, not substances, what difference does it make?
To begin with, it changes our relationship to death. Should i be a substance, then your death of my physical organism means 1 of 2 things. If my existence depends upon my body remaining alive, then your death of my body system may be the end of me. Or, if I can somehow exist independently of my body system, then death is the beginning of the radically new phase. But if I am a assortment of attributes, then death is one thing else – it’s just like a terminal hard disk crash. An annoyance, but not a catastrophe for those who have a backup.
If we are attributes, then change matters. Change is like death and rebirth, but don’t have to be so radical; mostly we change gradually, preserving enough to make us recognizably ‘the same’ from one day, or year, to another.
Am I exactly the same person I had been at five? There are similarities. I remember thinking ahead to starting Grade 1 using the sinking feeling which i was about to lose my freedom for a long time. On July 1st of 2009, It seemed like I’d managed to get through. Again I’ve the opportunity to do what interests me. However, there are lots of differences between me at age five and me at age sixty-one. Same person? Could it be a definite question?
As attributes, then our relationship to our future and past selves isn’t radically not the same as our relationship to other people. It is different in degree, not kind.
Each of us plays an essential causal role in determining how life will be for the future selves. Things i learn today can become a memory or skill I retain for a long period. Basically fry my brains with crystal meth, the near future Gordon may regret it.
We affect the lives of others, and the world around us. Beethoven’s music and Shakespeare’s plays are recreated in a large number of minds, centuries after their deaths. Every conscientious parent and teacher conveys an abundance of information towards the children within their care. And that we all influence one another as we interact, willy-nilly, in countless ways.
I hated the 3rd President of a company I remember when i worked for. He was a former Xerox executive who fired a detailed friend (the first President). I plotted to get him sacked, and eventually succeeded. Annually later I was writing during my journal, and caught myself while using word, “Boom!” in the same odd way he did. I’d picked up from him. And although I tried to stop, a couple of years next I was still saying “Boom!” by doing so. A bit of his personality entered me, and stuck around. Like a tune stuck in my head. Just like a software virus.
Our brains are wonderful at storing memories, mannerisms, habits, skills, emotional responses to various types of events – all of the qualities that make us who we’re. When our brains cease working properly, we might be so transformed as to be recognizable only by face, fingerprints, and dental work. The continuity that healthy brains provide allows us to carry out projects that take too much time, like being a surgeon or families. This provides us a very good reason to try to preserve the life and health of our biological organisms.
But our brains’ ability to store details are not our only means of influencing the near future. We also write things down; and what we write can be read by others. And that we talk. Many jobs are too big to become accomplished by a single individual. Leaders are individuals who share an image, inspire others to work towards a typical goal. Asking others to support your cause is not unlike exhorting you to ultimately start some personal project.
The concept that we’re attributes, not substances, casts a new light around the diversity that exists within individuals. I know a few who fight bitterly and often when they are alone together – but could instantly transform into gracious, delightful hosts when company arrives for dinner. Voice tones vary from harsh and hurtful to pleasantly modulated, light and musical. It’s as if different spirits came to inhabit their health – the angry ones displaced by the benign ones. But what are these spirits? Brain-states triggered by a change in circumstances. Like sad and happy tunes played on the same instrument, or different programs operate on exactly the same computer.
If we are attributes, not substances, then your immortality we can aspire to consists within our effect on others and on the world at large. When I die, I lose the highly integrated continuity engine that is my central nervous system. Basically have lived without putting my stamp around the world I grew up in, without reaching out to others – then it is indeed a death, but maybe not one which makes much difference. But if I have communicated to others what I really think and feel, transformed some world, those effects do not suddenly stop when my brain dies. I survive, within the only way I’m able to survive.
And while my organism is alive, it’s more or less the same thing. My affect on my future selves is much like my influence on others. I’m able to be useful, or I’m able to cause trouble. I can prudently consider their interests, or perhaps be wasteful and short-sighted. I have an influence on what will happen both inside my skin and outside it. Your skin isn’t such a extremely important boundary. It’s an important boundary from the biological organism, but if we’re attributes, skin does not limit us. Information can flow across skin.
I can feel a reaction kicking in – “Wait one minute! I am a biological organism! I’m a individual, flesh, bones and guts.” That idea is difficult to shake, and grips us in the first hint of threat. I suspect the sense of physical self is grounded in millions of many years of evolution. It’s easy to imagine a living creature with no sense of the boundary between itself and the world – the skin line. This type of creature could be at high-risk of injury, and might have lost within the Darwinian struggle against other species more attuned to protecting and nourishing their bodies. Behind my sense of physical self is a major biological imperative.
The imperative applies not just myself now, but myself at other times. The prosperity of the human species depends on our propensity to worry about ourselves and our families later on – to lay in provisions for winter, arrange for our children’s education. We bound our lives with a visceral sense of self, which shapes and motivates a lot of what we do. A menace to self always gets our attention. Opportunities to acquire stuff are rarely ignored. Greed and fearfulness often dominate our behaviour. Some people believe that domination is excessive. But many of us are susceptible to it.
I would recommend that we acknowledge our feelings, and move on. We now have many urges rooted in biology. We have learned to curb some of them. Particularly in Canada, most of us are pretty good at inhibiting our aggressive impulses. We disapprove of unbridled violence; we recognize the need to suppress aggression in order to have a civilized life. We are a smaller amount prone to suppress our selfish impulses.