A Theory of the Self

A commonly held view of the self is that it is somehow divorced from a body, such that after death, which is to say, the ceasing to function or dissolution of a human brain, the person may still exist in some ghostly afterlife. Some people even experience themself during life on occasion as having an out-of-body experience, such as hovering above their body and looking down at it. I personally don’t believe the self exists without a body, nor “out of” one. No brain, no self; and while I don’t doubt there are experiences of hovering over one’s own body, I view these as no different from dreams, which are still firmly housed in the brain.

                The question remains: What constitutes oneself. It is one thing for there to be a self; but when is it the same self? Thus, suppose you wanted to travel to Mars as quickly as possible. A rocket ship would take too long. But you could use what the transportation service calls a teleporter, which involves scanning your body on Earth, sending the data to a receiver on Mars via electromagnetic radiation at the speed of light (just as we now send and receive data to and from satellites and space probes), and then fashioning a new body on Mars according to this “blueprint.” I am asking: Is this really teleportation? Is  it you who would emerge on Mars?

                I am convinced that it would not be you, but a clone of you. One piece of evidence is that, if we kept your body on Earth intact and functioning, there would then be two bodies; but presumably there is only one you. But even without that presumption, even stronger evidence (as I portrayed in a scifi story called “Teleporter on Trial”) is that as soon as the person opens their eyes on Mars, they will be having difference experiences from you on Earth. There will not suddenly be a split-screen experience of both bodies seeing the red skies of Mars and the blue skies of Earth, etc. I conclude, therefore, that the person who emerges on Mars, although identical to you in appearance, and able to recall all of the events of your life that you yourself remember, and possessing all of your traits, and even believing they are you, would not be you.

                One practical upshot is that if the standard mode of (supposed) teleportation is to disassemble the (sedated) body that entered the transmitter once confirmation is received of the emergence of the person from the receiver, the first person will die. Somebody else will be on Mars, but not you. So there really is no such mode of transportation. This is only a copying device. And nobody in their right mind would ever use one.

                But what, then, is this (same) self, or oneself, if it is not preserved in (supposed) teleportation? It must be something different from the entire set of one’s conscious experiences (up to the point of the faux teleportation, i.e., duplication), since the person on Earth and the person on Mars have identical sets. So is a person to be identified with a particular body or brain? It is not clear. We might suppose the answer is no because, for example, you are presumably the same person whom your mother bore and yet how different your body is today from your body as an infant. There is reason to believe, however, that many of our brain cells last a lifetime. But not all of them do, and it is also unclear if replacing the ones that normally do last would result in any change of personal identity.

                I would like to do an end run around these difficulties and propose a composite theory of the  self as an enduring consciousness connected to a particular body. But I must further clarify two things: (1) The “particular body” is to be understood in the normal way, such that you today and you as an infant are part of the same particular body (but you and your clone are not), and (2) An “enduring consciousness” does not have to retain the same content to endure. (2) is obvious from the fact that what we are conscious of varies from one moment to the next.

It is also to be noted that consciousness endures (in the sense relevant to my analysis of the self) during apparent gaps, such as in dreamless sleep. But here there is an ambiguity. Do I mean to suggest that we are still conscious during dreamless sleep, or only that, by stipulation, our consciousness endures if it resumes upon dreaming or awakening? There is a further ambiguity: Assuming the former (that we are still conscious during dreamless sleep), are we then experiencing contentless consciousness (“pure consciousness”), or is the content of our consciousness at such times some sort of objectless expanse?

Without attempting to resolve those ambiguities, I want nevertheless to suggest another practical upshot (in addition to avoiding purported teleporters) of the theory of self I propose. This calls for another scifi thought experiment. Suppose you believed you were going to be put to sleep and then permanently deprived of your memory of who you were, and that, upon awakening, that person, having no idea who he is or was, would immediately be dumped into a vat of boiling oil. Would you feel terror or anxiety at the prospect on your own behalf, or only concern on behalf of some stranger?

I myself would feel high anxiety. I take it, therefore, that I believe it would be me who was to be dumped into the vat. This, of course, proves nothing. It is only an intuition. Furthermore, I have a philosophical friend who (to my amazement) does not share this intuition. (What is yours?) On the third paw, I’m not sure that there is any better basis for deciding this question than intuition. Would we then just decide the question by majority intuition? Well, that is another question in need of an answer.

All I can say is that I picture the vat scenario oppositely from the teleporter scenario. For there my intuition (which I think everyone would agree on) is that the experience of the person emerging from the receiver on Mars would, from that point on, be separate and different from the experience of the person who entered the transmitter on Earth (should he survive). Ergo, if it was I who entered the transmitter, it would be somebody else (albeit a clone) who emerged from the transmitter. But in the case of the vat, my sense is that one and the same enduring consciousness would be going to sleep and then awakening in a vat of boiling oil.

Countering this is the common reference to victims of dementia etc., who sometimes appear to an outsider as “not the same person.” But here there is yet another ambiguity, this time of “same”: qualitative sameness versus quantitative sameness. What I am suggesting is that although the demented person may indeed no longer have the same conscious content – in particular, they don’t have a clear sense of who they are – they nevertheless retain the quantitatively same (which is to say, enduring) consciousness. So they are the (quantitatively) same person, even though no longer aware of that and (hence) so (qualitatively) different from before.