X-Message-Number: 3802 Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 03:09:36 +1030 From: Nexus User floeber <> Subject: BRANCHING IDENTITY BRANCHING IDENTITY I have no brain - I do not think - I am single celled . But I have spawned a multi-cellular being whom I call "God" (and who calls itself "Humanity") to do my thinking for me. God is looking at me now through a great metal tube. This tube has a sculptured piece of glass in one end - it is shaped as the ideal amoeboid body, glistening as with an inner light: God made it! Through this silica chip I can see the eye of God. God has one very tiny eye and God is also very, very distant. Unlike me, God is also mortal: Mortality is the price of complexity. God suffers from a fatal design flaw called "ageing" - but She is working on it! I have lived a thousand million revolutions of the "Earth" about the "Sun" - abstract concepts that mean nothing to me. It took me nearly all that time to develop God. God has a brain that is even more amazing than a newt"s - and didn't I think that was clever, discovering land; "The Voyage of the Newt"! But I have only recently taught God to see me - my first instrument of self-study - and to think for me (which as I have stated I am unable to do for myself). I would have spawned and progammed this INtelligent Genetically ENgineered Externally Utilisable System earlier, but the only tools I had to work with were Time and Chance: With INGENEUS I could have done it instantaneously...[Watch this space for INGENEUS II]...and now you know why I call this beast "God" for short - what a mouthful! Too many mouthfuls - here we go again: I'm about to give birth - ooowwwhoa....! Its always the same, just when I thought I was going to be a mother it seems I'm my own daughter. "TWO - DAUGHTER - CELLS!". Did you hear that? That was the voice of God! (Such a loud voice for someone so small and distant, I can never work that one out). But back to my reproductive dilemma: If I am my own daughter, am I still me? And what about my/our other daughter - or is she not my sister, my TWIN sister in fact - I bet she's thinking EXACTLY what I'm thinking: Yes I KNOW she's thinking exactly what I'm thinking! She's thinking :-" What is my true age, and what is HER true age. Are we not identical twins of each other sharing the memories, experiences and heritage of a mega-millenium - how could minutes and hours divide us: Are we not one? Who is the copy and who is the counterfeit - I know who I am (but is this inner certainty sufficient to establish identity)? Is memory sufficient as ! a criterion to establish identity - what happens if two or more individuals appear on the scene with the SAME memories? Is physical identification a sufficient criterion to establish identity? Not here - nor in "INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS", for that matter . Because in my/our case it would seem that even if these were BOTH necessary criteria to establish identity they would still not be sufficient". Obviously, this is not a not a problem for God, not a practical problem, anyway - God is nothing if not diverse. But it is a problem for we/ me and so I have programmed God to solve it. I will, however, try to clarify this problem of amoebic identity by introducing a concept that would only interest a mortal - time-travel! Imagine a human - "'A' human"! ...humanity is cells all the way from MY perspective - who travels backwards in time and meets herself at a much younger age...Are these two individuals the same person? Yes? By what criteria? How many of the original cells remain in the older individual? (Have I and my sister not retained perfect bodily identity - the original cell that we were we replicated, the original remains, but now two cells instead of one). The two humans are genetically identical - but so are human twins developing from a single fertilized ovum, and so am I/we! The two humans share some memories - their memories overlap, but even where they overlap the memories of one are much fresher and more recent, and infinitely more personally relevant: These two humans may have very different values and opinions - but you say they are the same person?! Then there is no doubt that I and my sister are THE SAME "person". But how could you expect amoebas to agree that these two! different - such different - individuals are the same person: one is perhaps twice the size of the other, or more, and is physically different in other ways too, with different motivations and capabilities... Humans apply double standards - one set of rules for themselves and another for amoebas! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The problem seems to stem from a change in the number of individuals. In both cases the "individual" has multiplied, while fulfilling other criteria that might be applied to establish identity. What criteria for establishing identity can be applied equally to humans and amoebae? An amoeba resolves these paradoxes by using the concept of "branching identity"...this concept accounts for the multiplication of an individual where memories are shared, but where futures and fates diverge. The time-line of two individuals sharing branching-identity can be depicted as a "Y", which illustrates their common "ancestry", as well as their individual separateness. But how does this apply to the time-travelling human? The elder and the younger share a common time-line ...but do they, can they, diverge? Is this simply a paradox caused by the concept of time-travel - or does it raise wider questions of identity? I think the paradoxes involved stem mainly from the relationship between "identity" and "change" which appear to be in conflict but are inextricably interwoven in such terms as "personal history" and "personal development". Two separate paradoxes emerge:- (1) the problem of how one individual can become two and yet the two can share the same time-line, and.... (2) the problem of how one individual can be so different in respect of virtually all of the personal characteristics that we use to recognise a person at different times of their life. The first problem would seem to contradict the universal applicability of branching-identity since two individuals have emerged from one, but if we were to follow the time-line of the younger of the two it would eventually duplicate that of the elder, so avoiding any divergence. But from whose perspective could it be said that there were not two people, but only one individual, present in this situation? The second problem appears to affect both memory and body as criteria for establishing identity. For example, if I were to wake up tomorrow believing myself to be four years old, having the memories I had then, and behaving as I did then - would it be "me"? What DO we mean, then, when we use the term personal identity - and what would count as "preservation" of identity, or as personal survival? submitted by Frances Loeber. PS Ihope this will be formatted o.k. at your end. My sysop says that the problem is that different mail editors behave differently - yours treats a sentence as a continuous line of text... up to 2048 characters long in my case. All I can do is to make frequent use of the "enter" key. The above text is uploaded from a text file that I wrote using fairly short lines. My sysop said that you should receive it that way - if not, then there is nothing I can do about this problem. How much of a pain is it to abbreviate my long lines with your text editor? Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3802