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Immortality, Part One
Identity, Continuity, and the Star Trek Transporter (June 7th, 2008)
(Revised, January 27th, 2010)
"Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates. When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, 'Do I know you?'"
Steven Wright
Almost all of us imagine a life-long self. But what makes you the same person as "you" a few years from now? Please join me in a thought experiment:
You get on a DC-10, and disembark thousands of miles away. You're still you, right?
You beam down to
Organia
with Captain Kirk to warn the Organians of an impending Klingon invasion. The Transporter on the Starship Enterprise sends your molecules to the planet's surface almost instantly. Nonetheless, as with the DC-10, your molecules are moved from here to there. Still you, right?
But why should the Transporter work this way? After all, you are not the particular molecules that now constitute your body: in a few years you'll be made of different molecules. It's the pattern and activity of those molecules that results in you. So why send water, carbon, and other molecules through space at unimaginable speed? Star Fleet has the technology to replicate matter in any pattern (check out the cafeteria!). What we need is
information
. Let's redesign the Transporter to scan you, disintegrate your body on the Enterprise, and reconstitute you on the surface of Organia. You're probably getting a little nervous, but can you at least imagine that the perfect reconstitution on the planet's surface is still you? Can you imagine that you're conscious of the Transporter Room, and then you're conscious of the calm, sheep-like Organians?
Ah, but what if the Transporter malfunctions, reconstitutes you but fails to disintegrate the "original?" There are two of you! Which "you" would you find yourself in? Intuitively, you're still on the ship, and another person just like you is on Organia. If so, how can you believe you'll find yourself on Organia when the Transporter operates as designed, disintegrating your body on the Enterprise? On the other hand, if you
don't
believe that you can travel as pure information, how can you maintain any sense of a continuous self aboard the Enterprise, back here in 2008, or anywhere?* Again: the stuff that constitutes your body is changing all the time. It's the pattern, the information, that persists. And of course, that changes too, as we learn and age. You are traveling as information right now!
Oops: I offered immortality, and I seem to have delivered the opposite. All you have is this moment, then somebody else gets a turn as "you," and so on. But the wide-awake reader can probably think of several good ways out of this mess. Even I (or some future me-like person) might be able to think of something. Stay tuned for Part Two!
* (1/27/10) This conundrum first occurred to me when I was a teenage Star Trek fan. I've always assumed that thousands must be wrestling with the same thought experiment, but I've never encountered a mention of it -- until recently. In his delightful book
I am a Strange Loop
, Douglas Hofstadter presents roughly the same conundrum, and credits two seemingly independent sources: Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit (Hofstadter quotes at length from Parfit's book
Reasons and Persons
), and Dan Dennett, who wrote the forward to one of Hofstadter's previous books,
The Mind's I
. Some day, I hope to think a thought so strange that no one else has thunk it!
Klatch of other Strange Thoughts:
2009-08-25 -- The Numinous Shore of Partial Understanding: A Scenic Ride with the Base of Natural Logarithms
2009-03-17 -- Background Food: A Modest Business Proposal
2009-02-07 -- A Defense of Massive Conspiracy Theories: ...from one of the few who doubts them all.
2008-07-17 -- Immortality, Part Two: Prisms, Zombies, and Occam's Razor
2008-05-14 -- Tripping out of Trees
2008-05-08 -- Color Octaves: Sight, Sound, and Elegant Recurrence